Are the visions and dream images direct apprehensions of the spiritual world?
No, because they exist beyond time and place. So, they assume form in time and space as symbolic presentations. You have to have a hermeneutic system to decode the inner spiritual meanings. This was Kant’s main objection to Swedenborg, the lack of a canon of interpretation. Swedenborg talked to angels and visited heaven and hell and the other planets but his writing is subjective and fanciful. Do only these visionary experiences have spiritual meaning or do, as is true in esoteric Islam, the objects of the world also have spiritual correlatives? That’s very interesting. For Swedenborg, everything in the world was the symbolic manifestation of something spiritual. Let’s not forget that he was also one of the great scientists of his time and, I’ve learned, was probably very politically active, too. To his mind science itself was a grand hermeneutics. … Kant, on the other hand, wrote very little about ordinary perception. He limits his accounts of spiritual signatures to dreams, extraor
